Saturday 26 November 2005 06.22 EST
First published on Saturday 26 November 2005 06.22 EST

We on the website do, from time to time, gaze forlornly at the printed paper. Sparkling new presses, sharp design and full colour have invigorated visual arts coverage in the relaunched paper and given our colleagues downstairs plenty of imaginative headroom. But the basic form hasn't changed that much. Covering arts in a newspaper still relies on an alchemy between writer, photographer (or illustrator) and the person laying out the pages.

On the website we can't manage lusciously composed spreads, but we do have other tricks. We can build multiple galleries of images, enhancing features and reviews. Our arts weblog, Culture Vulture (blogs.theguardian.com/culturevulture), is brilliantly suited to events such as Glastonbury and the Edinburgh festival, enabling us to offer mobile, near-live coverage. We can host video. And we're using audio more enthusiastically than ever: our debut arts podcast, launched a few weeks back, is a walk-through tour of this year's Turner prize exhibition.

We can also experiment with displaying art, rather than simply commenting on - or writing around - it. So, when we were asked if we'd like to help set up an arts project that could only work online, we leapt at the opportunity.

The project is entitled imagine art after, and it's up on the site now at theguardian.com/arts/imagineartafter. The idea was seeded by Julia Farrington from the pioneering magazine Index on Censorship, and developed with the curator and artist Breda Beban. Their concept was to create something uniting artists who originate from the same country but are now spread out across the globe.

Seven artists now living in the UK are being partnered with an artist in their country of origin, and we've given all 14 a platform to exhibit their work, which extends through media such as paint, graphics and photography to video and web-based animation. What's on display can be glimpsed from the contributions of our two Serbians: Tatjana Strugar, living in Tirana, whose centrepiece is a moving, startling video of herself giving birth; and Sinisa Savic, a London-based photographer who contributes a powerful series of images grounded in masculinity and its postures.

The really exciting thing about imagine art after, however, is that it isn't simply about showcasing existing works. For the six weeks of the project each artist has been given a Guardian email address and access to a section of the Guardian talkboards where they're being encouraged to discuss life, art and everything. Anyone in the GU community can listen in or tour the works on display, and leave messages.

It's an experiment. Aside from the complexities of assembling a large exhibition amid the daily eddies of news - a tribute to everyone involved, from the curatorial team to designer and subeditors - it's thrown up barriers as well as breakthroughs. Our representative in Addis Ababa, Addisalem Bezuwork, had trouble just getting to an internet connection because of the disturbances there; her artistic partner, Senayt Samuel, gave birth a few days into the project. Elsewhere dialogue has been more fluent, especially between our Iranian pair, Amirali Ghasemi and Reza Aramesh, who have been furiously debating topics ranging from Tehran coffee shops to London studio space.

The project continues for the next few weeks, and will hopefully lead to a real-life, physical exhibition some time next year. It's easy to talk glibly about how the internet lays lines of communication where they otherwise wouldn't exist, but here, we feel, the web really is creating an alchemy all its own. Join us and see.